


all water

by godlet



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Death, Drowning, Gen, Ghosts, Graphic Description, Horror, No Dialogue, Unsettling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:50:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6795484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/godlet/pseuds/godlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's always been scared of the water. Funny and all, how she ends up dying.</p><p>Amity Park starts to notice something weird in the water. Phantom investigates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spaceedanny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceedanny/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Amber to Ember.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6745507) by [spaceedanny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceedanny/pseuds/spaceedanny). 



.

Maybe she was murdered.

 

She could still remember the feeling of the metal pole crashing into her stomach, forcing her up and off of the boat in a moment of reversed gravity. Seconds later she was bobbing in the water violently, the rudders of the vehicle so very close to chewing her up and spitting her out in bloody chunks that she instinctually swam in any direction but the propellers shoving bubbles in her face.

 

She wonders if her step-sibling really meant to do that.

 

When she was done doing kamikaze spins in the middle of the salty ocean, her head finally breached the chopping waves. Cold, cold wind bit her skin as she watched, unbelieving. The boat was still moving away. It wasn’t turning around.

 

She wonders why no one turned the boat around.

 

She waited. Maybe it was only ten minutes, maybe it was an hour. She waited for the boat to come back. Like a popsicle, she bobbed and fought against the pulling of the waves. It felt like being submerged in ice.

 

She wonders how she could’ve possibly survived as long as she did.

 

Futile. She got smart at some point a realized that her bulky boots and giant coat had to go. She spent a few harrowing minutes underwater wrestling everything off, unable to keep herself afloat without constantly pumping limbs.

 

She wonders why she didn’t just swim downwards and never come back up and get it over with.

 

She chose a way to swim forward. It was in the general area of where the boat might’ve taken off in, but her little dance underwater had robbed her of any sense of direction she had left. She desperately tried to remember any sort of swimming forms she might’ve known – breaststroke, frog kick, freestyle – but she just couldn’t seem to get her quivering muscles to replicate them.

 

Trauma. If she had lived, she would’ve been traumatized. Irrevocably changed.

 

She was tired out within the first half hour of swimming. There was nothing in sight – not a single object on the horizon. Just waves and water and the cold, gray sky yawning above her and dipping its fingers into the ocean.

 

She wonders if her boyfriend misses her.

 

She didn’t dare look down more than a few times. It was like from a childhood nightmare – the dark, dark depths of the water holding something monstrous and eldritch. Then again, she was desperate enough to pray for Cthulhu to come and swallow her up; _don’t leave me to this fate._

 

She doesn’t know when she noticed it. Her entire body was numb almost the second it hit the water, perhaps from shock. But now, it was well and truly on its way to hypothermia. To giving up.

 

Imagine her hysteria when her filmy white fingernails began to pop off of her bloated, wrinkly skin like peeling googly eyes off of a ten-year-old art project.

 

Too bad she never understood that death wasn’t the end of change.

 

Her arms upper body went numb before her lower – the air was several degrees cooler than the above freezing temperature of the water.

 

Suddenly her chin wasn’t staying above the wave line. Her mouth was constantly filled with water. Her nose was sucking up salty fluid and choking her sinuses into burning, itching, spasming fear that her lungs couldn’t compete with.

 

A heavy lead body was all she had left. That and the notion that her life was ending.

 

 _Drowning,_ she thought. _Drowning._

 

_I’m drowning._

                        *      O                                                                    o                                                                                                                             O      *

          O

                               *  O                                                                        *             o                                                             o      *

                                                                    *          O                                                                  o

              o            

                                                               D _R_ O _W_ N _I_ N _G_                                      *                o

                                          o                             o                                                                                                    O

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   *  o              o                           o           

                                                             O                                                                             o                      *

 

                                    o             o             *                                                                             o                                                             O

 

Danny doesn’t know what to think when he starts seeing a glowing purple light showing up in almost every water source in town.

 

Well, actually, at first he thinks ‘cool.’ But then he hears people complaining about how a ghost might’ve been enchanting the water supply or something, and how a few days later there was a city-wide boil advisory. Then he realizes that he’s gotta ‘go ghost’ and get on it; a job for Phantom has arisen.

 

The first plan he has is to stick his intangible head into all of the major sewage pipes in Amity Park. All he sees is the usual; escaped ecto-samples being unwitting lawful citizens and aiding the city by (albeit slowly) consuming parts of waste and litter.

 

He sort of dreads the day he has to describe _that_ set of circumstances to his parents.

 

Next, Danny scopes out the non-contaminated water pipes. Well, he only _assumed_ they’d be non-contaminated. Turns out there was this ‘up-and-coming’ ghost villain who was trying to infect all of the humans in Amity Park with some weird illness that Danny barely listens to. The half-ghost lets the tiny, angry thing monologue all of its plans for about five minutes before squishing it underfoot once and sucking it into his thermos.

 

He goes home that night only semi-satisfied. The little ghostie he caught was a putrid green color, and exhibited no powers that could possible affect every supply of water in Amity Park. It just wasn’t adding up.

 

Sure enough, several days later, the ‘purple powered water’ issue has yet to be resolved.

 

Now reduced to grumbling to himself at odd times and earning weird looks for his behavior, Danny’s third and final stop is the middle of bumfuck Lake Michigan. It is, apparently, exactly where he needs to go, as there is a very faint purple light near the deepest part.

 

Feeling awkward and apprehensive floating, alone and open, in the middle of a cold and deserted lake was not on the top of Danny’s bucket list. Even worse was the revelation that simply hovering and staring into the water, hoping that something will happen, wasn’t cutting it.

 

He’d have to… go into the water.

 

It’s, like, ten degrees outside.

 

Awesome.

 

Like the true hard-hitter he’s grown to be, Danny nose-dives into the lake directly above where he sees the faint outline of purple haze. He holds his supernatural breath just in case – he’s not keen on being wrong about needing to breathe in his ghost form right now. He does, however, understand that he can hold his breath for much longer than a normal human, as he doesn’t have any ‘functioning’ muscles that require oxygen to keep moving.

 

Being in the lake itself is… weird, to say the least. He feels like some sort of fish hooked to a lure, near blindly slicing through the water with his arms and legs as he heads towards the purple light for what seems like hours.

 

What he finds is… unexpected.

 

What he is seeing is almost beautiful if not desperate and depraved. A wildly thrashing and fluctuating figure tangled in each of its many limbs, limbs which would randomly detach and filter into the water like diffusing honey in hot tea. What appears to be thin, long hair engulfs it in sluicing rivets, causing it to seem like a constantly repeating video reel of a writhing body in a field of fuzzy wheat.

 

He spots a human feature amongst the mess – an arm. It is flailing just like the rest of the being, though it is very obviously reaching outward in some sort of distraught way. It is pale and gray, fingers bloated and stubby with dried green patches. Mottled with unnatural blackness, it grasps painfully towards anything, yet capturing nothing.

 

Danny doesn’t need any more hints – he makes a grab for that hand, narrowly avoiding getting trapped in the worrying vortex.

 

It was as if he pressed pause.

 

Not even the tumultuous currents of the deep lake bed are shifting the entity. All movement is halted, leaving behind a terrifying snapshot of an amalgamation of pure panic. The hand is still outstretched, barely catching on natural light filtering down through the murky water and not of its own purple ambience.

 

But Danny is running out of air and can’t stop to smell the death roses right now, so he grips that pale, ugly hand as hard as he can and begins to swim back towards the soft light of the sky. The weight he is pulling acts like it doesn’t exist – a net full of holes with nothing caught in the middle.

 

Danny’s head and then body pops above the waves as he flies into the air, sucking in as much as he can and then coughing it out as he accidentally pulls water in through his nostrils. He harries a look back at the… _thing_ he supposes he rescued.

 

It looks like a wet cat, now. All of its limbs (?) and hair are drooping and lifeless. He can just barely make out some sort of face dangling from the end of the arm, its mouth (?) opened to show several rows of dull, flat green teeth that seem more useful as bundles of soft, spongy nerves than hard bone.

 

As soon as they are no longer dangling directly above the water, it begins to move again. One second it’s as still as the dead (ha!), the next its using its supernatural strength to crawl unnervingly speedily up its arm, up Danny’s arm, and then finally latching onto his side with several of its limbs, its nose (?) pressing into the side of his neck.

 

It cocks its head back and begins to _wail._

 

Normally, it takes anywhere from five to ten minutes for him to fly from the middle of the lake back to land, depending on where he’s at and where he wants to go. Danny makes it there in about two.

 

Unfortunately, the nearest point of landing is on some of the more populated docks. Fortunately, however, there are only a couple of kids there. They’re all standing up from their little hangout spot and staring into the sky with anticipation, no doubt having heard the thing’s wailing from miles away.

 

When Danny lands, the kids all stay a good distance back, but don’t hesitate to pull out their phones to either start recording or to textually update social media.

 

Ah; classic Amity Park.

 

The thing slides out of his arms and quiets, flopping to the wooden dock and looking (?) around with an oddly detached neck. Its arms (?) and limbs (???) all listlessly grope around as if searching for something.

 

Suddenly, its head whips around to Danny so fast that he nearly puts an ecto-shot in its body in defense. There’s a moment of breathless silence before it’s giving him an ugly, soft, toothy smile.

 

And then it shatters into several shards of purple light, its essence trickling away through the gaps in the dock and dissolving into the water like it was never there.

 

…Mission… Accomplished…?

 

Danny doesn’t even notice that he’s been standing there staring at the same spot for several minutes until he is being waved at by the approaching kids. He tries to turn his brain back on, and even adopt his mock ‘hero’ tone that he’s adopted recently in order to both mask his voice and his temperament, but it probably falls flat.

 

They ask him what happened. He tells them what he’s only half sure about; it must’ve died drowning, got confused, and continued to think it was drowning even after death. So he saved it. By giving it peace, it was able to move on.

 

They’re giving him appalled looks full of despair, so he rambles, anxious and awkward. Some ghosts aren’t meant to _be_ ghosts, he elaborates. Sometimes they just need a little extra help in moving on. That’s what his job is, actually – to guide the ghosts that need help just as much as protecting the humans.

 

And then he jumps ship and flies away without a goodbye since the teens look like they’re about to ask him more questions, turning from horrified to intrigued with only a small bit of extra information. He heads straight home, bypassing a couple of ghosts that probably need to be captured, but he wasn’t thinking about that right then.

 

Danny’s honestly never felt so desperate to be dry again in his entire life.

.


End file.
